Future-tech is proud to be the official sponsor on the 2012 Data Centre Dynamics Innovation in Micro Data Centre Design Award.
What are micro data centres?
Although much of the chatter in the data centre industry is around the big data centre projects most data centre facilities in the UK, and no doubt throughout EMEA region, are deemed as “Micro”. This means they house up to 40 cabinets and have a total IT power capacity of 250kW.
Who uses them?
These are the types of facility that most “owner operators” have and use. These facilities span all business sectors and can be found in Universities, Hospitals, Insurance, Design and Creative, Oil and Gas, Local Authorities, Defence, Accounting, Legal, Automotive, Research, Security, Pharmaceutical and the list goes on and on.
What makes them special?
The vast majority of micro data centres are built within buildings that serve other purposes and were not designed to house technical white space. This means these facilities, and their power and cooling solutions, need to be designed around a restrictive set of constraints. These constraints often include, height and space, structural pillars, poor access, long distances to plant areas and power supplies, restricted power availability and restricted working conditions. Many larger facilities are housed in custom built buildings that only serve the data centre. This makes their design and installation in many ways more simple.
Micro data centres are often squeezed in to undesirable spaces the rest of an organisation doesn’t want to use. There is often a preconception that these micro data centres cannot be energy efficient because of the constraints they are forced to work within, however this is not the case. Future-tech has designed and built eight micro data centres that achieve annualised PUEs of less than 1.3, three of which have annualised PUEs of less than 1.18. These are facilities rated as Tier 2 or 3, have full N+1 or 2N resilience and operate within sealed close-control environments.
Why is Future-tech sponsoring the Micro Category?
As explained earlier most data centres currently operating fall in to the micro category. Although there is much talk about managed services, co-location, the Cloud and other forms of outsourcings many organizations still want to have close control of their server estate. This is due to many reasons such as information security, financial benefit and IT flexibility to name just a few. It is with this in mind we feel a continued focus on these facilities is vital for the “health” of the industry as a whole. Many lessons can be learned from micro facilities and scaled up to larger ones, something that happens much less often the other way round.
In 2009 and 2010 Future-tech designed and built data centres were awarded the Data Centre Dynamics Innovation in Micro Data Centre Awards. In 2011 one of our designed and built facilities made it through as a finalist but was unfortunately pipped at the post on the night. Despite this we are very proud of our accomplishment and genuinely try to make every facility we work on as good as it can be within the constraints that are set for it. Our Designers and Technical Engineers take huge pleasure in creating facilities that raise the bar.
So what is Future-tech entering this year?
As we are sponsoring Micro we are unable to enter the category, so we have put our data centre at Trinity College Dublin in for Leaders in the Public Sector Award. We’re happy to announce that this facility has been shortlisted as a finalist out of a large number of entries, which is fantastic for both Future-tech and Trinity college Dublin.
The TCD data centre is deemed as a micro facility and like many of the entries in the both the Micro and Public Sector Categories has to work around some challenging constraints. Despite this the new data centre can boast a 100% IT load, annualized PUE of 1.16, and a 20% partial IT load, annualized PUE of 1.3, within a true close control environment. The data centre can support cabinet IT densities of up to 25kW with no alterations to the systems. This data centre will provide Trinity College Dublin with a resilient energy efficient facility for the next 15 years. If you’d like to know more about the project or would like to visit the TCD data centre please email us at info@future-tech.co.uk
Bio. James Wilman is the Sales and Marketing Manager at Future-tech EMEA. He sits on the British Standards TCT/7/3 expert panel which is working on the new data centre design, construction and operation standard. James has a passion for resilient energy efficient data centre design and operation. Linkedin profile